It is true that the vast majority of "research" is done by non-academics. Lots of companies doing market research want to mine media data.
Still, I believe that this "social media research" is a bit overvalued. There was this wave of "social media is the primary source where information appear". But now many realized how freaking difficult to separate this data from the noise comparing to traditional news published by journalists.
Also, take a look on this article [2] about how Dataminr sells insights from Twitter data to foreign governments (2017). Seems like just a way to punish the opposition channels.
[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14412014/dataminr-twitter...
What evidence is there that read-only API access will make it significantly easier for them (enough to outweigh the other upsides)?
Are there ethical implications of working with Twitter to gather data? Despite Twitter TOS, legal, IRB ok, are there informed consent issues in studying the artifacts of social media use?
And the streaming API was terrible. Even if there was no data on the stream you could consume tens of gigabytes of bandwidth a day. Dreadful.
This is gross. Rather than using the internet as a democratizing force for education, they restrict the program to those already inside credential-granting institutions. So much great research has been done from outside the institution and yet Twitter is actively pushing outsiders to resort to scraping.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-product/twitter-g...
there's a lot of strong people especially in CS who do not work with academia and still work on interesting stuff
Similarly, if you're researching bots and spam and how they manipulate people & markets - this is still useful.
